Having studied myth and legend in my college days, I learned that the oral tradition is 1 of 3 main forms of communication. The other two are food and sex. Perhaps there is even more categories now, like sexting. Being a scientific novice, by way of not being able to do the math among other limitations, I am am interested in some of the side stories that come out of scientific history that the public sensationalizes and believes. I am sure there are gray areas. Like Andy Warhols' repetitions of singular images, the oral tradition accumulates or omits minor details here and there throughout serial retelling. The personal asserts itself in the framework of the variation. A vital role of the folklorist is to step away from the context and look at the tapestry of the versions of the stories. Many things can be determined. Some elements might circulate repetitively in stories or conspiracy theories that might tell us about the culture at a specific times and change at other times depending on some cultural element or another.

John Searl's 0 point energy legend. The legend is that he created a magnetically driven motor that required no input of energy and produced so much energy that it became superconductive and levitated. The story is that he was creating levatating 'discs', which he then manned and flew experimentally. John also claims to have had dreams which told him to use the math of magic squares to determine the amounts of each physical element to include in these 0point energy propulsions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXndaua2f-w

Leon Theremin. Theremin was a dapper Russian gentleman who invented a serious instrument under Lenin. He was sent to the United States to promote this scientific phenomenon. He was the center of the social elite residing at the Plaza Hotel for a time before disappearing. Having read his personal accounts, he was needed back in Russia and was escorted by KGB members where he remained for the rest of his days. Leon started his life's story by describing his memory of being born. He claims to remember every detail of the event. This is just the tip of the iceberg concerning Leon. He spoke very fondly of Lenin as they were personal friends.

Odd Harmonics: Judith Banks Gallery. Here is a show that included many variations of the Theremin as sculptural objects. I attended this opening and follow up erotic poetry readings. The show included Theremin's original theremin instrument. I loved this show. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCrZSM3F2Q

Autodidact, John Kanzius, trying to cure his cancer, accidentally discovered that he could burn salt water for fuel. A revelation that came in the middle of the night while tinkering with pie pans his kitchen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNvLwDX2WW0

What do these stories tell us about ourselves, culture, and what we think is possible or impossible?

Below you will find a link to an article discussing a protein discovered in birds' eyes called cryptochrome, which allows them to detect magnetic fields when no landmark is in view. This explains how they travel with such instantaneous organization. The heart of the question I was interested in lies in the latter portion of Ed Young's article. I have pasted it in below the link to the full article. The connections between light, cryptochrome and a magnetic sense were laid out by Klaus Schulten and Thorsten Ritz in 2000, in a bravura paper that united biology and quantum physics.

The current consensus is that humans cannot sense magnetic fields. Birds can do it, as can bats, turtles, ants, mole rats, sharks, rays, and more. Recently, Czech scientists have suggested that foxes, cows and deer also have the same ability. But look at all the recent reviews in this field, and you’ll see very little mention of our own species. A decade ago, a German group showed that our vision is slightly more sensitive in some directions than in others, but the results have not caught on.It wasn’t always like this. In the 1980s, Robin Baker from the University of Manchester carried out a series of experiments which seemed to show that humans could sense magnetic fields. He took busloads of blindfolded volunteers on winding journeys for several kilometres before asking them to point their way back home. They did so more often than expected, and if they wore magnets on their heads, their accuracy dropped.The results were published in Scienceand you can read Baker’s own description of his study in this 1980 issue of New Scientist. He even wrote a book about it. At the time, Baker said, “Whatever the repercussions, we have no alternative but to take seriously the possibility that Man has a magnetic sense of direction.”Unfortunately, the main repercussion was a fierce series of rebuttals. Over the next decade, several groups around the world failed to repeat Baker’s results, even though Baker himself had no problems in doing so. He argued that their failure could have been due to local magnetic anomalies or brief changes in the strength of the magnetic field due to solar activity.An American duo – Gould and Able – charitably suggested that Baker’s British students “either had cues available to them which were absent in our experiments, or are dramatically better than Americans in using whatever cues may be involved.” Max Westby and Karen Partridge, who failed to replicate Baker’s results in Sheffield, were less kind. “Perhaps it depends on which side of the Pennine Hills the experiments are conducted?” they asked. “It is obviously extremely difficult to counter all conceivable explanations for a negative result but we are forced to wonder about the ecological importance of a magnetic sense, the existence of which is so difficult to demonstrate.”In the end, Baker relented and he moved on to the science of sperm. When I talked to him about the new study, he confesses that he hasn’t kept up with the field. “I’d spent nearly a decade, tested thousands of people under all sorts of conditions, and had absolutely no doubt. Then people did a few tests here and there and claimed the experiments didn’t replicate,” he says. “Even after I’d collected everybody else’s results and published that taken together, they did in fact constitute successful replication, nobody wanted to know. There was an element of ‘Sod them, then’.”Reppert thinks that Baker’s story was an unfortunate one, especially since he stopped just when others were starting to discover light-based magnetic sensors. “I think Baker’s work was very good work but a lot of people had trouble reproducing aspects of it,” says Reppert. “It’s just very hard to do these sorts of behavioural experiments in humans.”My thoughts are that magnetic sensing is connected to a more primitive instinctual state.